Dale Debakcsy has a new book about Elton’s music coming out on 30 March in the UK (late May in America).
One reason he wrote Elton John: Album by Album was to ”draw back the curtain” and decipher ”hidden meanings.”
Throughout the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy LP, for instance, Dale discerns a ”there and back” motif which is played differently on each song to give us insight as to where Elton and Bernie are in their story, and how they are doing. Someone Saved My Life Tonight is ”an absolute masterclass in using leading tones to create tension, which we experience as a sort of melancholy yearning.
”Heck, even Sail Me Away from Lestat uses really neat gradual shifts in the notes of its chords to capture a sense of the motion of the sea in ways our brains can understand even if our ears don’t pick up on them.”
Dale also delves into enigmas, like ”what musical elements link The One and The Circle of Life? What do they say about how Elton told musical stories during that era of his career?”
The book contains a good deal about sound effects as well. With Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, for instance, the author says Elton used ”a descent through the Circle of Fifths” to augment the feeling of rootlessness in Bernie’s lyrics.
Also discussed is Ray Cooper‘s ”gong in water to create a saucer sound” for I’ve Seen The Saucers and Gus Dudgeon‘s whistle in Hercules to approximate the sound of a rhinoceros.
Dale, who writes primarily about the history of science and music, hopes to do a chapter about Elton’s collaboration with Brandi Carlile, Who Believes in Angels?, when Album by Album comes out in paperback.
You can pre-order his book HERE
